2012 Book Review #38: A Clockwork Orange

[jethrien]

Title: A Clockwork Orange
Author: Anthony Burgess
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 2

Synopsis: Violent sociopath is brainwashed into no longer being violent.

Thingummies: I understand that this is a revolutionary and deeply influential work.

I hated it anyway.

I'm honestly not certain what theme the author actually intended here. Alex is a reprehensible, completely valueless excuse for a human being. His brainwashing makes him incapable of choosing to continue his crimes. This is declared to be fundamentally wrong, as it leaves him less than human (and incapable of enjoying music, his one higher passion). The brainwashing is undone.

It's clear that Burgess is ridiculing the activist author whose wife died after Alex raped her who nonetheless is against the brainwashing treatment. What I'm not clear on is whether Burgess fundamentally believes that brainwashing is morally abhorrent because it removes choice and thus humanity, or that the people who would make this argument are fools. If he believes the former--well, honestly, I can't agree. Alex is so horrific an excuse for a human being that I think he's voluntarily waived his rights to continue to be human. We're not talking about someone who is led astray by a bad environment and matures in jail to regret his actions and long to be a productive citizen--he stops only because he's forced to.

If it's the latter--well, I can't help but feel that the author failed. The impression I'd gotten before reading this is that the general cultural reception of the book is to consider Alex something of an anti-hero and the brainwashers antagonists. If Burgess was trying to argue in favor of doing what's necessary to end crime (or at least, against those who argue against it), I think he missed his mark. It feels more like a glorification of violence than anything else.

The prose is difficult--it's in a mixed of Cockney and made-up slang. It is rewarding, in a way--Alex's voice is repugnant, but intelligent and surprisingly lyrical, in a brutal way. Some of the passages try very hard to soar. If I wasn't hating Alex the entire time, maybe they would have.

The forward in my edition contains a very public, barely restrained spat between the author and the publisher, in which he claims that the first American edition (which Kubrick based his movie on) was missing the last chapter, as a condition of publication. He's now insisted they put it back. The publisher stiffly replies in his own forward that the omission was merely an artistic suggestion the author accepted at the time. I'll admit that the sheer nastiness of Burgess' tone prejudiced me against him from the very beginning--he comes off as self-righteous, petty, pretentious, and arrogant.

I will go ahead and spoil that last chapter, since Burgess does so in his forward anyway. Burgess claims that Alex grows up and that omitting the chapter removes any shred of hope. I see no such shred. Alex doesn't regret what he's done--he mostly just seems to age out of the need to do it all the time. He realizes that his own son will perpetuate the cycle and he won't be able to do anything about it. He wants people to remember his glory days even though he's now starting to slow down and not have enough energy for beating/robbing/raping/murdering several people a night.

Basically, I hated this book. Not for the difficult-to-parse half-real, half-made-up slang--I thought it was clever, if worn a little thin. Not for the violence--I can handle violence with a point. But for its nihilism and for its incredibly unclear, incredibly important muddle of a message. This is a polemic. The fact I can't tell how tongue-in-cheek it is meant to be feels like a failure. Clearly, others have disagreed. But I don't actually see much point in staring into the void just for the sake of the void staring back.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think one of the Wildcats wrote her thesis on this...

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I'm sure she did. I can see why academics might go into paroxyms over this. But I think it's fundamentally self-indulgent. The author himself, who clearly was a jerk, was irritated that it got so much attention and sounds like he'd half want to repudiate it.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Her thesis was on the use of language to distance the audience from violence, using Clockwork Orange and American Psycho as examples, and then discussing the translation of these stories to film, and what the different medium means for the content of the story.

She wrote it in like a day, though, so I have no idea how coherent the point was.